Series note: The following post is part of the Rutgers Graduate Student Blog Throwback Thursday blog series, in which we will repost one of our most popular blog posts from years past.

Having recently gone through the postdoc application process along with some of my peers, I thought it might be useful to summarize some of the things I learned. But first one major caveat: the application process varies considerably across disciplines, even across subfields of the same discipline. Just within physics, the process is fairly different for particle physicists versus condensed matter physicists versus biophysicists. (NB: my area is theoretical and computational biophysics.) Thus the universality of any one person’s experiences may be fairly limited, so please bear that in mind with everything I say! So here goes… Continue reading “Applying for postdoctoral positions in the sciences, part I (Throwback Thursday)”

Do you have a favorite example of the early, unseen research that makes today’s technologies possible? The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is speaking out in social media and blogs against efforts to gut funding for earth science and social science research. As OSTP’s Jo Handelsman notes, “People’s appreciation of game-changing new technologies frequently ignores the long, often twisting path that transforms an idea from fundamental discovery to practical application.” OSTP encourages you to share stories on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and more with the hashtag, #BasicResearch Read more

Last week I began a list of things I learned from my recent experience applying to postdoc positions — here is the second half of the list. As I mentioned in the previous post, keep in mind that the process can vary a lot across disciplines, besides the fact that even in the same field different people can have quite different experiences. So this just represents my own experience in biophysics, but I hope it will be useful to someone else! We will start the second half with what I think is one of the most important points…

Have alternative plans. I once heard a professor claim that people should only do a postdoc if they are “academia or bust,” and it really irritated me. There is no “or bust” in life — even under the best of circumstances, there is always a chance things won’t work out the way you wanted, and we all must have alternative plans for every aspect of life. Do think carefully and realistically about your career goals and whether a postdoc is a good fit, but even if you decide a postdoc is your first choice right now, it should definitely not be your only choice. (Corollary: doing a postdoc because you don’t know what else to do is usually a bad idea.) So spend some serious time contemplating what your next moves will be if the right postdoc doesn’t work out. Even if you end up doing a postdoc anyway, careful planning now may pay off if you arrive at a similar juncture later. But moreover, knowing that you have other options will make your whole application experience much less stressful. You can rest easy knowing that even in the worst-case scenario for your postdoc search (i.e., no offers), you’ll have other options and life will go on.

But still be persistent. Don’t give up if your first few applications or inquiries go nowhere (of course, having those back-up plans will help to make this less discouraging, too!). Unfortunately, many applications or inquiries to professors receive no response. If you are just contacting individual professors asking if they even have a position available, I think it’s worth sending a follow-up e-mail after about a week if you don’t hear from them. If you’ve formally applied to a group or fellowship program, you may need to wait a few months to hear back, although I think it’s still worth following up at some point if you haven’t heard a response. If someone really isn’t interested in you or just doesn’t have an opening, you deserve to hear them say so.

Be prepared for your visit/interview. After applying, you may get invited to visit the group or department. Sometimes you’ll give a formal research seminar to the whole group; other times there is private interview with just faculty. The Graduate School-New Brunswick has held workshops on such interviews in the recent past, and they are worth attending. You also usually have a series of meetings with faculty, current postdocs, and possibly grad students. Besides having ready a good spiel about your research and career goals, do your homework on the people you’ll be meeting. Make sure you know what kind of work they do, and plan some things to discuss with them. Of course you may discuss each other’s research in these meetings, but they are also key opportunities to get inside information on what the group is like and whether you’d be happy working there. Don’t discount the meetings with the postdocs and grad students. Besides the fact they can give more honest feedback on the working conditions, their advisor may ask them later what they thought about you, so try to leave a good impression.

Negotiate. Once you receive a formal job offer, you should go over the terms of the contract carefully and consider what is negotiable. Salary and the length of the contract are obviously important, but also find out about health insurance, access to funds for travel and equipment, if they will help you with relocation expenses, employee privileges (can you use the campus gym?), and any other benefits. My understanding is that salary is usually not very flexible for postdocs (since salaries are often set by grants from the federal funding agencies), but some of these other things, like relocation expenses, are. Talk to your current advisor or other postdocs to find out what’s typically negotiable in your field. It usually doesn’t hurt to ask if you are reasonable about it.

So that’s it. I hope the above points are useful to others out there, but if you disagree with something or have other points to add, please post a comment!

Having recently gone through the postdoc application process along with some of my peers, I thought it might be useful to summarize some of the things I learned. But first one major caveat: the application process varies considerably across disciplines, even across subfields of the same discipline. Just within physics, the process is fairly different for particle physicists versus condensed matter physicists versus biophysicists. (NB: my area is theoretical and computational biophysics.) Thus the universality of any one person’s experiences may be fairly limited, so please bear that in mind with everything I say! So here goes…

Start early. In some fields there is a well-defined application season (e.g., starting in the fall and concluding in January) and in others applications are accepted all year, but starting early is important in either case: you want to have the longest possible window to find opportunities. In general, I think you should start looking about one year before you intend to graduate and start the new position — so start looking now if you will graduate in the spring of 2015.

Cast a wide net. As you make a list of groups, fellowship programs, etc. you’re interested in, be as broad as possible. Ask your advisor, other faculty, current postdocs, and other students for suggestions; there may be lots of interesting opportunities out there that you haven’t heard of. You want to have as many options as possible. For one thing, unlike undergrad or grad school applications, there’s usually little cost in applying to a huge number of these things (no fees and many have identical application requirements). But besides that, many of these opportunities are very competitive and also subject to a good deal of luck. Sometimes your dream group just isn’t hiring the year you’re looking for a job, or you just happen to apply when they are changing directions or when a rising superstar applies as well. So your top few choices may become unavailable for lots of reasons, and you want to be prepared for that.

Apply for competitive fellowships. Besides postdoc positions in individual research groups, many fields have fellowships for postdocs. Some are federally funded (e.g., NSF or NIH), others are funded by private organizations, and others are specific to an institution. The Graduate School-New Brunswick’s GradFund program has lots of resources on these, so check out their website and appointment offerings. Fellowships tend to be extremely competitive, but you should apply for as many as you can anyway (remember the previous point?). Many require the same materials you’d submit for any other postdoc application, so they require little additional effort. Even if you don’t get a fellowship, applying to them can still have benefits. Writing research proposals is an important skill, and the more practice you get, the better. Maybe you’ll at least interview for one or two, providing another chance to meet people and practice interview skills. Or maybe they’ll get your foot in the door for another opportunity. Something like this actually happened to me: I applied for a fellowship that I ultimately didn’t get, but the process got my foot in the door with the group that sponsored my application and enabled me to receive a separate offer from them.

Write a research statement, but first figure out how it will be used. Most applications ask for a “research statement” without specifying what this should include or how it will be used. Since this may vary across disciplines and types of postdoc positions, I recommend trying to figure out the conventions for your field so you prepare your statement accordingly. For example, one field I know consists of two subfields, and faculty merely use the research statement to determine which of those subfields you’re in. So in this case the details of the statement don’t matter much and therefore aren’t worth a huge amount of your effort. This was generally my experience as well — I doubt anyone read my statement in much detail beyond skimming the general topics I listed. (Note: this is in contrast to a research proposal for a grant or fellowship, which likely WILL be scrutinized carefully!)

Have a decent CV and website. Besides your research statement, most applications will require a CV. I won’t cover how to make a CV here, but spend some time making it organized and easy-to-read if you haven’t already. I also recommend setting up at least a basic website if possible. I made a personal website early in grad school, but for the most part it hasn’t served much purpose. So I was a little surprised to realize people were looking at it when I applied for postdoc jobs. I’m sure they didn’t peruse it in detail, but they at least saw my picture and probably glanced at my papers, research interests, and teaching activities. This probably doesn’t make a big difference, but it’s another data point to confirm your legitimacy, especially for a professor drowning in dubious applications. So if you already have a website, make sure it’s up-to-date and be aware of what you put on it; if you don’t have a website, consider setting up a basic one. It doesn’t need to be fancy, just a place to post contact information, your CV, maybe a photograph. If you don’t know HTML, web services like WordPress offer easy-to-use templates, and even simple composers like iWeb or Microsoft Word will get the job done. Get it linked somewhere on your department’s or advisor’s page to make it easier to find.

I hope these thoughts are useful to some of you — next week I will post part II. In the meantime, feel free to share your experiences and ideas in the comments!

In a previous post, I described my experience at a workshop (organized by the Rutgers Graduate School-New Brunswick) on communicating science. I described the importance of preparing descriptions of your work for a spectrum of likely audiences – having at least some idea of what aspects of your work to emphasize to different audiences and what language or ideas to use are critical. However, in addition to these more customized versions, having a more generic but highly-polished description of your research that you can recite from memory at any time is probably worth having. This is often known as the “elevator speech,” since it’s supposed to be something simple and short enough that you can say it during the time you’d spend with a stranger in an elevator.

I’ve had a murky version of this for a while, but it was largely a vague set of examples and analogies I liked to use when describing my research to a friend or family member rather than a well-crafted summary. But the workshop motivated me to finally develop a better version, so here is my latest attempt:

Every cell in your body contains thousands of different kinds of molecules, stuffed into a very small space and interacting with each other in complex ways. How does this mess of molecules ultimately do all things that cells do, such as making new cells, extracting energy from food, and transporting nutrients? And how did the precise interactions of all these molecules develop over millions of years of evolution? This knowledge is important both for treating human diseases in which these cellular functions go wrong (e.g., runaway cancer cell growth), as well as engineering microorganisms to perform useful jobs, such as synthesizing biofuels with bacteria or making better beer with yeast. My research uses mathematical models and computational techniques to understand how natural selection changes these molecules and their interactions over time. We want to use this both to understand how organisms naturally evolved in the past and to predict how they might evolve in the future.